It all started with steel cut oats. Which I love. But about eight or nine months ago I couldn't find the name of those oats that have such a great texture. I would say "cracked oat groats", and then I would look helplessly to DinoVino and say, "What are they called?" and he would tell me "steel cut oats". And a couple of weeks later the same thing would happen. When I looked in my mind for that name I'd find a neutral but unmistakable emptiness. A nothing, in fact.
As I groped for substitute words I sometimes came up with "stone ground oats" but I knew that was wrong. They weren't milled or ground. And so I would look to DinoVino again and again say, "What's the real name?" and he would tell me.
This went on for months. Lucky is the person who has a patient other person around to give the answer to such questions.
One day I was able to make a connection. Stone ground—which I could pretty reliably access—started with s-t-, just like steel cut. And from that little similarity I was able to lead my mind to steel cut every time—though I usually had to pass through stone ground on the way.
And look at me: steelcut oats. Steelcut oats. With nary a hesitation. A true success story.
This experience led me to my own neurological theory. As part of the microangiopathy (a fancy name for an aging brain), neural pathways are blocked all over the place. The little neurotransmitters that have so faithfully and reliably led me to the words I needed throughout my whole life are now randomly blocked. Here and there. Access denied. Connections destroyed. Gone. Not gone the way they were fifteen years ago when I blithely talked about mice eating my brain. Because in those days it was just a question of waiting for an hour or a day or a week and then the lost word (words) would arrive as it they'd never gone away.
This new loss was different. Nothing was there. A black hole was where something should be. Used to be.
But with the steel cut oats, I realized that I had consciously created a new pathway. A roundabout but successful new road for the little neural things to follow. Steel cut oats were still there. The WAY to them had been lost, so I'd built a new road in order to access the words.
Well, there you are. Problem solved. Just start right in and do that for every missing word. But here's the real problem: you don't know what's missing until you reach for it and find the nothing.
After a robbery the police always ask (standing in the middle of an overturned room), "Is anything missing?" Well, how the dickens are you supposed to know that? How can you pinpoint a negative? It won't be until you need something, you reach for something, that you'll be able to say, "Oh, THAT's what's missing!" And I suppose that you then call the detective in charge of your case and say, "Oh yes. My favourite coat is gone. Or my best frying pan. Or my new face cream." (Do thieves steal face cream? Probably depends on the brand name . . .)
Back to the brain. So until there's a way to take inventory of my words, I won't know what's gone. It'll only be when I try to find it that it will make itself known by its absence.
And then I guess I'll focus on that need and create a new pathway for it. And there you are: I'll have two successes: that one (whatever it might be) and the steel cut oats one. When you think of the memories stored in the cloud of my mind—words, events, joys, sorrows—it's daunting to imagine retrieving them one by one. One by one. One by one. More likely I'll muddle through, asking DinoVino when necessary, and forging those new pathways only for the words that are truly important to me--like steel cut oats.
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